A Science News Article
Physics Behind the Headlines—Project guidelines
Hello freelance journalists! Welcome to our magazine titled “The nerdy geek”. We are
just starting as a magazine and we need your help.
The ultimate goal is to write a news article but first you must do some research.
This project is in two parts:
Part A) In the first part you need to choose a subject and find sources for the material. Any physics topics are allowed. If you decide to write about science that we have not seen yet or that we will see later on, do try your best to get the physics right but it will be graded accordingly. In other words, don’t limit yourselves to physics we have seen, you can try new things and I will consider the fact that the physics is more advanced in my grading. The sources that you use must be serious e.g., a book, a NOVA show, … Be careful with random websites, they are often not very good.
In part A of the assignment, I am looking for a choice of subject, good sources, and “index card notes” for each of your resources. By “index card notes” I mean bullet points of notes from your readings. Write in your own words and distill the basic ideas and concepts. For each idea/statement, record the page and source where you got it (or time in a video).
If there is a brief beautiful quotation (you would only have a few), you can include that, too, being sure to enclose it in quotation marks to mark it as a direct quotation and not your own phrasing of the idea. (Note: If your report contains nothing more than what could be found on Wikipedia or similar sites, it will not be accepted.)
List your sources (e.g., title, author, year for a book; for another type of source, there must be enough information that it could be easily found by the reader) and how you accessed it.
Part B) Now we need you contribution to our magazine “The Nerdy Geek”. You should write about the science subject you chose and the text should be a news article format.
The subject does not have to be recent news but it should be written as if it was. You need to emphasize the impact on society. If you have a friend that you can interview, please go ahead. Even just interviewing a relative for their opinion on a scientific subject is welcome. You can, if you want, include a couple of “fake” scientific quotes to make the text more believable as a news article.
Tips on writing a newspaper article.
1) You need a headline or title (something catchy)
2) Byline. This the name of the authors
3) Lede or lead. This is the first paragraph and it should give a preview of the whole story. It should summarize the story and include all the basic facts. It should contain a hook to keep the reader interested and make them read the whole text
4) Story: Contain facts—no opinion allowed unless it is a quote from an interview.
5) You will need to find at least one figure/graph.
*** The Nerdy geek readers are scientists; make sure to spend a good part of the text to discuss the basic facts about the science (equations are allowed if need be).
But it should not just be a physics report. For any choice of subject, try to give a social spin to the story.
• What is going on at this time in the broader world that connects to this discovery?
What motivated this work?
• What are the consequences of this work? What is its immediate and long-term significance?
• General biography of person (or people doing this work). Whose work influences them / on whose work was their work built?
Length Requirement:
Part A needs to be 2 page single spaced and part B needs to be 3 pages single-spaced (not including references). This is with 11 points font. Make sure to look at the rubric to ensure that your news article addresses all the points that will be graded. I am primarily looking for a well-balanced magazine style news article.
These lengths are bare minimum and you may well need more text to get your point across.
You article will need to contain at least one figure or graph (that is carefully explained) to get full credit. Look at the rubric for more details.
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